"Hounddog" kicked up a fuss for the casting of 12-year-old Dakota Fanning in a role that featured an allegedly graphic rape scene. The flap recalled "Pretty Baby," the 1978 film in which a barely pubescent Brooke Shields played a New Orleans child prostitute to much public hand-wringing.

Writer/director Deborah Kampmeier has cleaned up the rape scene for this re-edited version of "Hounddog." But nothing can redeem this mendacious swamp of a film that shamelessly exploits its young heroine in the name of raising sympathy for a blighted childhood. The whole distasteful mess is sunk up to its neck in a brew of Southern Gothic atmosphere and hocus-pocus sentimentality.

Fanning plays Lewellen, a thin-boned, large-eyed waif who drifts between the house of her Bible-bound grandmother (Piper Laurie, in a reprise of her "Carrie" role) and the shack that her shiftless father (David Morse) shares with his flighty girlfriend of the moment (Robin Wright Penn, in the movie's only textured performance). Longing for an absent mother, Lewellen passes her time in a humid 1950s Alabama small town swimming with her friend, Buddy (Cody Hanford), fetching beers for her adored father and fantasizing about Elvis Presley.

From the first shot, of a Garden-of-Eden snake slithering up a branch, Kampmeier swathes her story in a portentous solemnity it never earns. Cicadas trill ominously. Spanish moss droops across the screen. Summer storms dump sudden torrents of rain. Afemo Omilami plays a black folk doctor whose arsenal includes a rich knowledge of snake lore, true blues music and a storehouse of commonplace wisdom. In an unintentionally comic moment, lighting strikes a tractor and turns Lewellen's previously lethal daddy into a childlike invalid.

Lewellen's hopes and dreams center on Elvis, whose hit song gives the film its title. Hips waggling and voice suggestively lowered, she'll perform her Elvis impression for all comers. When she struts her stuff for a teenage boy, in hopes of scoring a promised ticket to a forthcoming Presley concert, she gets raped inside a shed, with her playmate Buddy looking on.

It's clear, from the quick cutting of the scene, that the filmmakers have snipped out the more salacious aspects of the assault. What's left are shadows, truncated body parts and a long shot of Fanning's vacant, dirt-streaked face.

This semi-tamed "Hounddog" may have answered the most obvious charge about the rape scene. But the noxious sexualizing of a child permeates the movie. Fanning spends most of her screen time thinly clad, her torso swiveling in her musical moments or legs lolling open as she idles in bed. She and Buddy play doctor in an early scene. The camera tours her body in attentive close-up. "Hounddog" winds up endorsing the very idea it ostensibly denounces - that this 12-year-old girl somehow got what she was asking for.

"You can't let them win," Omilami's upbeat sage tells Lewellen near the end on the story. But her resistance, such as it is, is an empty straw victory. "Hounddog" has it in for its young heroine all the way.

Fanning, like Shields, will move on. She's already an experienced and accomplished young actor. Her intuitively keen performance in "The Secret Life of Bees," now in theaters, may help distract moviegoers from this misstep. But she'll probably regret making "Hounddog" some day and hope that it disappears, as it certainly should.